Big Brother Blues

1986

In collaboration with Bettina Gruber

TV production ZDF / Second German Television
5:53 min
Production on U-matic
Music: Bettina Gruber
Production: Blitzvideo

A film dealing with watching and being watched, small and big worlds, reality and mock-up reality. A game in scales and dimensions.
Big Brother Blues consists of three parts:
1. The mountain is calling.
2. The laughing pyramids.
3. Dangerous snow.
The three “Tableaux” show quiet highly concentrated images, that are accompanied by flowing yet accentuated programme music.
A little voyage into known and yet unknown worlds.

“This work consists of three scenes which all have the characteristics of kitschy picture postcards brought to life: a mountain in close-up turns out, as the camera zooms back, to be a simplistic artefact paper; an Egyptian landscape lit according to the rules by the setting sun, turns out to be “got up” with nodding pyramids and a sphinx with all the external appearance of a Bavarian stag; a polar beer plots valiantly onward, only to end up on a plate surrounded by twirls of whipped cream.
Vedder and Grubber are having a romp with reality.
They conjure it up momentary through, in particular, the use of subtile lighting only to distort it speedly into a playful variant of itself.
The artist herself underlines the need not to take this manipulation to seriously, by appearing on the screen at the end of each scene in a ludicrous costume. The kitschy plinky – plonk music corresponds perfectly to the images.” RP
from: Catalogue Kijkhuls World Wide Video Festival, Den Haag, Netherlands 1986

Big Brother Blues

Maria Vedder
Big Brother Blues

1986

In collaboration with Bettina Gruber

TV production ZDF / Second German Television
5:53 min
Production on U-matic
Music: Bettina Gruber
Production: Blitzvideo

A film dealing with watching and being watched, small and big worlds, reality and mock-up reality. A game in scales and dimensions.
Big Brother Blues consists of three parts:
1. The mountain is calling.
2. The laughing pyramids.
3. Dangerous snow.
The three “Tableaux” show quiet highly concentrated images, that are accompanied by flowing yet accentuated programme music.
A little voyage into known and yet unknown worlds.

“This work consists of three scenes which all have the characteristics of kitschy picture postcards brought to life: a mountain in close-up turns out, as the camera zooms back, to be a simplistic artefact paper; an Egyptian landscape lit according to the rules by the setting sun, turns out to be “got up” with nodding pyramids and a sphinx with all the external appearance of a Bavarian stag; a polar beer plots valiantly onward, only to end up on a plate surrounded by twirls of whipped cream.
Vedder and Grubber are having a romp with reality.
They conjure it up momentary through, in particular, the use of subtile lighting only to distort it speedly into a playful variant of itself.
The artist herself underlines the need not to take this manipulation to seriously, by appearing on the screen at the end of each scene in a ludicrous costume. The kitschy plinky – plonk music corresponds perfectly to the images.” RP
from: Catalogue Kijkhuls World Wide Video Festival, Den Haag, Netherlands 1986